For those of you who missed it, here's the dozen word summary of Live@edu: Free student email, hosted by Microsoft's Exchange 2010 cloud, with a 10GB mailbox

The case studies for the Live@edu email service keep coming - this time, it's the Delaware Department of Education and United Arab Emirates University…

Delaware Department of Education using Live@edu

They are migrating 20,000 faculty and staff as well as 129,000 students. Their case study has just been published, and there's a couple of quotes that stuck out for me. Jim Sills, Delaware chief information officer and secretary of DTI said:

Beyond just email, the services provided through Microsoft Live@edu will allow the state to reduce overall support costs and eventually provide a seamless interface with the existing Microsoft platform to access tools such as Microsoft Office and Excel

And Ron Usilton, the Lake Forest School District Information Systems manager was quoted as saying:

Resources, such as interactive whiteboards and mobile computer labs, along with online learning programs, provide our students and educators the tools for a 21st-century education, but a method to provide better staff and student collaboration still was needed.

The United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) has just chosen a mix deployment - with the existing 13,000 current staff and students moving to an onsite Exchange mail system, whilst 55,000 alumni students get access to the Live@edu Cloud email system. The driver for the change was that their existing mail system was reaching the end of it's life:

The system’s calendaring capabilities were limited and did not include sharing. Interfaces were not intuitive and frustrated both users and administrators. Storage limits forced the IT department to restrict users to relatively small mailboxes, and performance was slow. In addition, management was costly and complex, and it was difficult to defend the system against unsolicited bulk email messages.

Not only did the new implementation improve the service deliver, the UAEU have calculated - from implementation costs, staff, facilities, equipment and power use - a saving of over $270,000.

Over the last two days, there have been a couple of interesting articles in the The Australian newspaper, which are worth a read. I'm sharing them here, because they give a useful insight into some of the issues being debated in education in Australia - which ICT could help with.

More time in class does not a student make

This article, written by Julie Hare, The Australian's Higher Education Editor, looks at the current generation of students going into universities, and asks 'Are we over-educated?'. It throws in a few statistics, like:

In 1901, 0.07% of the population went to university

The government target for 2025 is that 40% of students will get a bachelor's degree

20% of graduates could be considered to be over-educated for the job they hold*.

There are two really noteworthy quotes in the article. The first, from Phil Lewis, director for the Centre for Labour Market Research at the University of Canberra, says the primary reason for the shift to demand for higher-level skills is that the structure of the economy has fundamentally changed since the 80s:

We now have very much a service-based economy. Manufacturing and agriculture and demand for manual labour has waned, while demand for service-based skills, such as interpersonal skills, creativity and teamwork, has increased dramatically

And Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Britain's University of Kent , is quoted as saying:

I don't think we are overeducated, we just force kids to spend far too much of their life in organisations that masquerade as education institutions

Challenge of focusing education reform

A day later, John Hattie's article, talks about the fundamental challenge for Australian education - that although Australian ranks highly in the world student achievement tables, it has been slipping down over the last decade, and the major drop is among those students who are above average. In the article he argues for 'earned autonomy', with successful schools being given greater autonomy. He highlights that Australia has one of the lowest between-school variabilities in the world, but that overshadows the bigger issue of within-school variability, which is largely driven by the impact of teachers. And Australian teachers spend almost twice as long in front of students as many other Top 10 countries (1,100 hours compared to 600).

He talks about the need to change assessment, to use it to help a student learn more, by knowing where they are and can go next, rather than at the end, to work out what they learnt (but not being able to use that for the next stage in the journey). He finishes with a clear call:

It’s all about the teachers – and we have an excellent cohort in Australia. Let’s esteem them, resource them, and help them “know their impact” on every student in our schools.

* The actual quote in the article, from Kostas Mavromaras at Flinder University, goes on to say "including the 100,000 people with degrees who work in sales". Which is astonishing presumption - that if you work in sales you are over-qualified if you have a degree. Bit of a shock for a bunch of colleagues sitting around me today!

One of the schools that I worked quite closely with in the UK was Twynham School, a high school on the south coast of England. The school staff were in regular demand as conference speakers, sharing their experiences of enhancing learning and their school community through the work that they had done with ICT - and as a result, they are widely known for their SharePoint work.

Travelling 13,500 kilometres to learn from another school isn't possible for everybody, so it's great news that Mike Herrity, the Assistant Head Teacher, and Dave Coleman, the ICT Manager, have organised a webinar. Unfortunately it's at a very un-Australian-friendly time - 7pm UK time/4am Sydney time

Here are the details, if you'd like to attend in your PJ's (or if you're from the UK or US, where the timing works):

Many of you will have heard bits of the story of Twynham School and our creation of a well-established learning platform using SharePoint. Through various case studies and presentations at conferences around the world over the last 5 years we have been very fortunate to be able to show our work creating compelling custom applications and engaging students and teachers to gain high user adoption. We have had quite a break from presenting and writing up our work for nearly a year and so we thought it might be useful to put a free webinar on to show you some of the new and exciting things we have done with our learning platform, SharePoint 2010.

What’s new with Twynham School SharePoint 2010-11

In this webinar we will take you through our initial work creating a highly developed Learning Gateway from 2007-10. In the second half of the session we will break out into new code the team has written which has not been shown to anyone yet. This includes:

A whole new ‘My Site’ development with custom skins which allow the user to create a themed environment.

A fully searchable SharePoint Knowledge Base for end users, admins and developers to support them working with SharePoint 2010.

A CPD (Continuous Professional Development) system which removes the paper chase from work requests.

SharePoint Rewards system which enables teachers to instantly award points to students who can see their scores in real time.

Mike Herrity and Dave Coleman will be presenting this webinar live on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm BST/2pm EDT/4am Sydney time!

Want this at a sensible time for Australia? Email Mike directly and let him know. Or send him a tweet. I'm sure if enough of us ask, then they'll do it…and in the meantime, take a look at Mike's SharePoint in Education blog

It changes the jobs that IT people do in schools, TAFEs and Universities, because most of the basic IT infrastructure just sits there in a cloud data centre, and you switch it on;

It changes the costs of introducing new IT services, because the usual barrier, a big up-front capital cost for servers, goes away and is replaced by a pay-for-use subscription;

It changes where your storage is, and how much bandwidth is needed - because your data is stored out in the cloud;

And it changes your development practices.

Over the last few years, as education has adopted Live@edu, and education email has moved to the cloud, these changes have been visible. But it's been on a small part of the network infrastructure. Over the next 2-3 years that impact is going to grow, as services like Office 365 come in and supplement or even replace some of the other parts of your IT infrastructure (when it's fully here, Office 365 will deliver Exchange, SharePoint and Lync as a service in the Cloud).

One of the first groups of people to need to know how to manage this change are your developers - because as they develop applications for your users, they'll need to know how to develop these applications for a Cloud service. The good news is that Cloud services aren't all closed - you can develop applications which work to supplement these core Cloud services - whilst there's a different methodology to development, it still uses the same tools that developers use today - like Visual Studio and Silverlight.

So if you're a developer, or you've got developers in your organisation, there's a set of training resources that are really useful:

Office 365 Developer Training Course

The Office 365 Training Course contains developer focused presentations, self-paced labs and links to key resources to help you build solutions that use SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. In Office 365, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Lync Server 2010 are hosted in Microsoft cloud datacentres, so using this course, you’ll learn how to build collaborative and communication focused cloud solutions that run in Office 365 using Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework.

The course is available as a complete offline download, and the modules include:

If you are going to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles next month, then there's the chance to join the worldwide Microsoft Education team for some of the conference sessions. With the team promising that you can "learn why education is one of the fastest growing industry segments at Microsoft", you'll also get clear updates on our products and solutions, and hear from other partners.

Education Sessions during WPC

There are two specific education sessions during the main WPC agenda:

July 12 - BP06i - Office in Education: The Evolution of Live@edu and Office 365 for EducationCome to this session for an interactive discussion around the Microsoft Office Cloud offerings for education. We will present an overview of Live@edu, the future of Office 365 for education and discuss the major opportunities this presents for partners worldwide.

July 13 - 4:15 pm - PS04 - Growing your Business in the Education Industry - Strategies for Success! Anthony Salcito, WW VP Education, will outline Microsoft’s overall strategy with the theme of "Partners and Microsoft –Education Inspired." Salcito will address how and where things are evolving for partners within our ecosystem. We are focusing on simplifying our approach, helping partners make money, competing to win and growing our joint market share by driving partner-led solutions.

Global Education Partner Summit at WPC

On Friday 15th July, directly after WPC, there is an additional event, the Global Education Partner Summit (GEPS) @ WPC, which is specifically reserved for education partners. This will in the morning, at the Omni Hotel in downtown LA.

Time

Title

Speakers

9:00 - 9:45

Opening and introduction

Larry Nelson & Anthony Salcito

9:45 - 10:30

Trends in Education: What you Need to Know to Grow Your Business Profitably in Education Industry

Not sure what to make of this news this morning, and definitely not sure what comment to add on this. So I'll go for the completely factual presentation of something I've just read on the Google Enterprise Blog. I know this is relevant to education customers and partners, because when we talk about our Live@edu email service (which is a Gmail competitor) we are always asked about our browser support, and to confirm that we support the main browsers being used by education establishments today, and students at home. And in many cases, we know that includes older versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers.

…soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

itslearning is a Norwegian learning management system (LMS) provider, and their solution is used by millions of students and teachers across schools, colleges and universities around the world.

The LMS market has seen rapid development and innovation over the last few years, as technology has changed alongside users' expectations and experiences. Where once monolithic systems were the default - with users expected to do everything in one complete system - the boundaries between the Learning Management System and other ICT systems in education have been rapidly moving. It created a tension between the closed messaging systems being created in Learning Management Systems, and the email systems that students were using for their rest of their work. Everybody knew that email/messaging had to be available in an LMS - but the early model of writing a closed email system as part of the LMS wasn't sustainable - because it was becoming increasingly expensive to manage and keep pace with systems students were using outside of this.

itslearning's answer was to offer a full email solution, as part of their learning management system, by using the Live@edu integration. It meant that they could stop developing the internal mail system, and integrate to the standard Microsoft cloud-based mail system already used by many of their customers. This took away the need for itslearning to develop separate filtering and control systems.

Now, when their users login to the itslearning system, they get Single Sign-On to their cloud-based mailbox, and things like email notifications appear within the LMS. And all of the other features of Live@edu are still there - like a 10GB email inbox in the cloud. It makes life easier for teachers and students (and, in some implementations, parents) as they have one single system to use and login, and the system handles the invisible connections.

As well as saving itslearning's customers' money, it also meant that they no longer had to deal with yet-another messaging and collaboration system. And for itslearning, it meant less development was needed to deliver more customer benefits. As their CEO Arne Bergby put it:

Why reinvent the wheel? We got a highly-used, familiar mail service without having to invent the UI or code the functionality ourselves. Even more, the integration was easy and we spent very little time working on the actual integration steps.

Somebody asked me yesterday what the differences are between the various versions of Microsoft SQL Server. Given that we have 7 different editions - in addition to the core editions, there are two free versions and three specialised editions - it's a reasonable question. The question made me think hard about the kind of data that's being put onto these servers.

Probably most education establishments will have a range of different SQL servers running, each running your student management system, email system, SharePoint system and a pile of others. And they may be running on different flavours of SQL - for example, a lot of primary schools will be running their student management system on SQL Express, one of the free editions, because they have small databases.

There's a handy table from the SQL Server team, that summarises very quickly the key differences, in terms of database support (eg the Express edition will support a maximum database size of 10GB), but it's in the features that the real differences come out - and help you to work out which version is right for you.

So, in an education context, here's my simple guide to choosing the right version:

In a nutshell, for the majority of education users, the Enterprise Edition is the right one to choose, because most school databases contain some sensitive student data (medical, behavioural), and that data is then at risk from unauthorised access or theft. Unless your server is very securely locked away, then you've got a data security risk. And if you don't have an audit trail of who's accessing what data, you've also got a data security risk that you can't even quantify. (Enterprise Edition also offers live mirrored backups, for more data resilience).

I have seen plenty of primary schools where the server for the Student Information System is in the school office, under a desk - right by the front door. And I've walked past plenty of them as I've headed towards a meeting with staff. With so much sensitive data now stored by default on these servers, they definitely need better physical security, as well as better protection for the data which is being stored.

With so much focus on data security, and privacy, it's right to think about how valuable your data is. With data storage growing massively, as more and more data is retained, the situation might well have changed since you last looked.

The idea with Windows MultiPoint Server is quite easy to explain - you basically have a group of screens/keyboard/mice connected to a single computer - and each users gets a full Windows 7 desktop. And you save on hardware, electricity and management costs.

Now I can point you to more detailed real-life case studies from schools using the system.

Windows MultiPoint Server in Indian classrooms

In India, the Gulzar Group of Institutes has used it to reduce the cost of rolling out 120 stations in one big computer lab. Their original plan, to deploy 120 desktop computers, would have cost them $60,000, but using MultiPoint they reduced this to $36,000. As Gurkirat Singh, the Executive Director for Gulzar Group of Institutes, said at the time:

We saved 40 percent on our initial hardware cost, which was a significant saving for us

They other savings they made were in power usage - saving over $10,000 a year - and reduced the number of technicians needed to support the system by 50%. Overall, the case study points to a saving in the first year of over $40,000.

Windows MultiPoint Server in Rwandan classrooms

On another continent, Gashora Girls Academy in Rwanda has used the latest version - Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 - to provide access to students who didn't have classroom computers. They were aiming to increase availability of IT , without making it too complicated to be managed by classroom teachers. And they also needed to keep a lid on their power costs, due to the high costs of electricity in Africa. They setup 36 workstations, and as Kimberley Mecham, the Technical Advisor to the Academy, said:

“Some of these girls have never even seen a computer before. Through Windows MultiPoint Server, they can experience the most current software and technology.

With Windows MultiPoint Server, we can provide cost-effective access to technology, and this is the kind of thing that really changes a whole community.

In addition to saving hardware costs, they have made significant savings on power - especially important when a kilowatt hour of electricity costs 22 cents. Their original plan, of 36 desktop computers, would have been costing $149 a month to run - whereas their new system costs just $29 a month - reducing power costs by 80%